Cartoon by Bob Eckstein
2026-02-20 00:06:02
2026-02-19 20:06:01
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At eleven minutes to eight o’clock on the morning of January 27th, in Corona, Queens, Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was about to wake up her daughter when she received a string of panicked WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván. “Mami, migración got me,” Iván, who is also undocumented, wrote. It was one of seventeen frantic texts, punctuated by typos and sobbing emojis, in the course of three minutes. “My God.” “Noo, my love.” “Pay my phone bill.” “Please. Mami.” “Please. Mami.” “I don’t have.” “Signal.” “They were just outside.” “They grabbed me.” “Three of them.” “And they’re taking me away.”
He had stepped out of the house only minutes earlier, and was heading to his job with a roofing contractor, when he walked right into a group of federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue. Iván was clearly terrified. He had never been convicted of a crime, Manuela told me, but he did have a deportation order to his name. He’d missed a scheduled immigration hearing, early last year. Manuela said that his hearing date had been changed but they had not been notified; it’s likely that his notice to appear had arrived at an old address.
When Iván was detained, his mind leaped to Manuela and Nicole, their three-year-old daughter, who lived with him in a rented semi-basement room up the street. He sent Manuela the texts so that she would know what had happened to him, and in the hope that she would pay his cellphone bill. It had been due a day earlier, and he was evidently desperate for his phone to continue working so that he could contact her later from wherever ICE had taken him. In fact, immigration authorities routinely remove migrants’ phones and other personal belongings; Iván wouldn’t be able to respond to any messages or calls after being apprehended.
With the notable exception of the harrowing arrests at immigration courthouses downtown, the scale of ICE activity in New York City hasn’t been close to what has been seen in such places as Minneapolis or Southern California. Still, neighborhood coalitions in Queens frequently share reports of active federal agents in migrant-dense areas, including Corona, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. A video recently shared with the news outlet The City shows agents busting into an East Elmhurst home and threatening a mother who was holding her baby. “Put your fucking hands up, stupid,” one agent says. In a predawn raid in Jackson Heights, scores of militarized agents from the Department of Homeland Security descended with assault weapons on a residential building, removing a man and woman from their apartment. ICE is said to frequently use the parking lots of a CVS Pharmacy and a TD Bank on Northern Boulevard as staging areas, and the agency appears to be most active in the early morning, when men like Iván are on their way to work.
Manuela’s life had turned in an instant. A foot of snow had just fallen in New York City, and the morning was frigid, but she had otherwise been preparing for a normal day: she would walk Nicole to a free preschool run by a Catholic Charities center, and she would continue her search for a job. Now her husband wasn’t coming back. She knew nothing about where he was being taken or how to reach him. Frantic and crying, Manuela called her mother, a middle-aged farmer in the remote central highlands of Ecuador, who, from so far away and not knowing where else to turn, sent a WhatsApp audio message to me. In 2024, I was reporting an article about Ecuadorian migrants for this magazine, and I had interviewed her and Manuela, who was then preparing to join Iván in New York.
“Yes, good morning, good morning, may God bless you, how are you?” Even in this emergency, Manuela’s mother began her voice note, in Kichwa-accented Spanish, with a series of formal salutations. “My son-in-law was in Queens, New York, and he was caught by migration, and he was taken away. My daughter is crying. He was taken just now, over there in Queens, New York. . . . You wouldn’t have a way of getting a lawyer, would you? Please help me.”
Manuela and I had kept in touch occasionally since her arrival in New York, in August of 2024, but it was challenging to keep track of her. She changed phone numbers a couple of times, and sometimes my messages went unanswered, or they were never delivered at all. Mostly, I learned something new from her if she reached out first—about where she was living, who she was spending time with, or how she and her little girl were faring.
After receiving the message from Manuela’s mom that day, I wrote to Manuela on Facebook Messenger, the only way I was sure of getting through. “What happened?” I asked. This time, she responded within seconds. “My husband was caught by immigration,” she confirmed, before adding, “Buenos días.” Switching to her latest WhatsApp number, she sent me a screenshot of the final messages Iván had texted her. She also sent photographs of documents that had been generated when he first crossed into the country, illegally, in April of 2024, and was intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol officers in the desert near Sasabe, Arizona. Printed on one of the sheets was his A-number, short for alien registration number—a unique numerical code assigned to non-citizen immigrants, including undocumented border crossers and green-card holders. Manuela could now use Iván’s A-number to search for him in ICE’s online detainee-locator system. But at first the system produced no results—he hadn’t been processed yet. Some four hours had passed since Iván was detained, and Manuela still had no idea where he was.
At the same time, she was facing a growing list of responsibilities and decisions, with few resources to inform her choices. Chief among those questions was whether she should stay in the U.S. to wait for her husband’s case to be resolved. Would he be deported quickly or held indefinitely? Would he be sent to Ecuador or somewhere else? She did not have the money to wait for more than a few days. She had only five hundred dollars in cash, and eight hundred dollars in rent was due in five days, on the first of February. Iván had finally found some steady work, but Manuela had struggled to find work ever since arriving in the U.S.; mostly, she’d looked after Nicole. Without her husband, she was essentially alone in the country, and had no close family to lean on; both she and Nicole were also undocumented, though their immigration cases were still in progress, and she had a court date scheduled for April. “I don’t know if I should go to Ecuador or not,” Manuela told me. Her mother was encouraging her to use the little money she had to buy plane tickets for her and Nicole. “But others tell me to stay, and to wait for him to try to make it back to this country. . . . I don’t know what to do. . . . I’m not working, and that scares me the most.”
At around one o’clock that afternoon, Iván finally called her. He said he’d been told that he would be deported to Ecuador in eight days. By the evening, he was in an ICE preliminary holding area at Federal Plaza, in downtown Manhattan. “He said that it’s very bad in there, and he doesn’t want to stay locked up,” Manuela told me. Later that night, I asked her if she had decided what to do. “I’ll drop off my daughter at preschool,” she texted, close to midnight. “And see if I know anything new about my husband.”
The next morning, Manuela seemed more hopeful. “I want to get a lawyer to see about getting him out of there,” she texted me. She had spoken with some of Iván’s relatives who lived in the Bronx. They wanted to find legal help, which she understood was very expensive—not to mention the fact that, given that a removal order for Iván had already been in place for nearly a year, his fate was likely sealed. But after all they had been through as a couple—surviving separate journeys from Ecuador and forging a new life in America for themselves—Manuela was not ready to give up so easily. “I want to provide a better life for my daughter,” she told me.
The little that Manuela knew about how to navigate life in the United States came from what other migrants had told her directly, and from what she saw on TikTok and Facebook (which wasn’t always reliable). Even more than other Indigenous Ecuadorian migrants I have come to know over the past several years, she lived a particularly precarious life in New York. Manuela, who had limited formal schooling, had trouble writing—this was clear from her texts, in which she constantly used “k” for “que” and “a” for “ha” and combined and misspelled most words. This made even the simplest bureaucratic tasks very difficult. She’d never found her way to the sort of nonprofits that offer legal services to migrants in the city, learning that they existed only after her husband was detained.
She and Iván still owed more than fifteen thousand dollars to a financial coöperative in Ecuador that had lent them more than twenty thousand for their treks through South and Central America and into the United States. Both of their families—Indigenous Puruhá farmers—were incredibly poor. Iván had left first, after his mother had developed an aggressive cancer; he was determined to find the money to pay for her treatments. “He left to save his mother, but she died when he was still on his way,” Manuela told me. By then, he had already walked across the Darién Gap, and was somewhere in Mexico; he couldn’t turn back. Manuela and Nicole, then just two years old, followed him once he’d safely arrived in New York. Avoiding the Darién Gap, they flew from Peru to Colombia to El Salvador; after she and Nicole made it to Mexico, they were locked up by smugglers, who extorted the family for an additional thousand dollars to insure their safe passage.
Amid the vast wave of new migrants and asylum seekers looking for work in New York, Manuela and Iván struggled to earn enough money. Before their first winter set in, they moved to Rochester, where Manuela became a housekeeper at a hotel. But their marriage nearly buckled under the pressure. In January, 2025, Manuela sent me a message asking how she and Nicole could get to Chicago, where a cousin lived. She had decided to separate from Iván, she said, because he spent a lot of time drinking with male friends, despite her objections. But she had no way to leave, and they were still living together. “I just want to go away,” she said. An uncle in Queens intervened to mitigate the crisis. “He didn’t let me separate,” Manuela told me. Her parents also did not want her to leave Iván. So she stayed. A few days later, she posted on WhatsApp a video of her husband and daughter, decorated with numerous praying-hands emojis. “We all deserve a second chance,” she told me, by way of explanation. “But if he doesn’t value it, in time I could end up separating after all.” By June of 2025, they had moved back to Queens. When they returned to the city, they found Iván’s removal order waiting for him, signed by a judge.
After her husband was detained, Manuela imagined what would happen if she went back to Ecuador. It certainly wouldn’t solve her financial problems: her family would never be able to pay back their debt. The financial coöperative would take her father’s truck, which had been used as collateral. She feared that her family might even end up in jail. “That’s why we don’t want to go back yet,” she continued to insist. “I’m going to get my husband out.”
Whatever hope she had of his quick release began to fade by the afternoon of his second day in detention. Iván called Manuela again, to say that he’d been transferred to a new facility, in New Jersey. The online locator system had updated to show that he was now being held at Delaney Hall, a notorious, privately run detention center in Newark. He told Manuela that she urgently needed to deposit money in his detention account, so that he could keep calling her with updates. He provided her with a telephone number and a PIN for making the deposits. She didn’t have time to find a piece of paper, so she scribbled the numbers down on the wall, above the light switch in her room. “I have no idea where I have to go to make the deposit,” she told me. I didn’t know, either.
She eventually found her way to a money-transfer office near 103rd Street, and deposited twenty dollars. With the exception of taking her daughter to and from the day-care center, it was the first time she had left her room since Iván’s arrest. They spoke again on the phone. He told her that he had offered her name and other information to the ICE agents, because he thought that it would make it easier for them to all leave voluntarily together. Manuela wasn’t happy about this—she worried that agents would now track her down and arrest her, too.
The rest of the week passed with little new information from Iván’s calls. By the third day, Manuela learned that he was being fed very little; he hardly had an appetite, though. He was very cold from sleeping on the floor, and had started feeling sick. “They don’t even give him a blanket,” she told me, after his only call of the day. (A D.H.S. official denied that there were hostile conditions at the center where Iván was being held, saying “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”) Manuela wasn’t making any headway on finding a lawyer; in truth, she told me, she didn’t even know where to begin. Manuela passed the days in her room, fielding calls from close relatives in Ecuador and from more distant ones in Queens, all of whom asked her for updates that she couldn’t provide. Despondent, she downloaded the CBP Home app, which the U.S. government uses to pay migrants to self-deport. She filled out her information, and waited for a response.
On the fourth day, a Friday, I received a voice message from Manuela that suggested she had begun to resign herself to calamity. Her rent was due in two days. “He’s still in New Jersey, they’re still not taking him out,” she said. “In any case, I want to buy the tickets to be able to leave, because this country is only going to get more difficult, more than anything with the current President. There’s no chance of me staying here. I don’t have the resources for a lawyer.” (Later that weekend, I put her in contact with an immigration attorney I’d met through previous reporting. The attorney told her that there was no clear remedy for her husband’s situation.)
A cousin began looking into buying tickets to Ecuador for her and Nicole. He collected four hundred and twenty dollars in cash from her. (Manuela didn’t have a bank account in the U.S., let alone a credit or debit card to purchase a flight online; when I asked her, she didn’t seem to know about travel agencies in the neighborhood which would let her pay for everything in cash.) By the start of the weekend, the matter seemed to be settled: she and her daughter would leave on Monday night, arriving in Quito at five the following morning.
Manuela told me that she was now certain of her decision, whether or not she received money from the U.S. government in exchange for leaving. “I cannot stay here anymore, because there is no way that my husband will get out of jail,” she reiterated. I called Manuela’s mother, who confirmed to me that she and her husband planned to leave their small town at midnight and drive all night in order to be at the airport when their daughter arrived at dawn.
That Friday afternoon, when Manuela had picked Nicole up from day care in Corona, she had told the teachers that her daughter would not be returning, because they were leaving the country. The day-care center gave Manuela a letter confirming Nicole’s enrollment, in case she needed it, and said that she was welcome to come back if their plans changed. But Manuela knew, at that point, that they would not stay in America without Iván. Nicole had a strong attachment to her father, and she never wanted to leave his side. Whenever the little girl asked where he was, Manuela only said, “He is working,” and Nicole accepted that answer for the time being. Before leaving the day-care center, Manuela filled up a cloth Target bag with Nicole’s school supplies and some artwork, and the two of them walked home between tall piles of snow.
“Something happened with my flight,” Manuela wrote to me on Sunday afternoon, the day before she planned to depart.“My cousin, he bought the flights for me and my daughter, but now he doesn’t want to give me the tickets,” she explained. Only after she called an uncle, to see what was the matter, did her cousin finally return her cash—it seemed that no tickets had been purchased in the first place. “I think he wanted to take my money,” Manuela said, though she wasn’t sure why he’d do that. Her plan had fallen apart. On WhatsApp, her mother reprimanded her for being too trusting of others—even of relatives. Manuela was angry with her cousin, and got very emotional just thinking that he might try to take advantage of her when she was in such a dire situation. She contacted her landlord, an Ecuadorian homeowner who lived upstairs. He told her that she could stay for an extra week, rent-free, because of her circumstance, but then she would have to go.
Five days had passed since Iván was arrested. According to the detainee-locator system, he was still in New Jersey, but he’d stopped calling as frequently. Manuela, who felt more alone than ever, only wanted their American nightmare to end. She had already sold or allocated most of her furniture—a television, some bedsheets, a dresser—to other migrants she knew. A pink rolling suitcase was packed with what few clothes that the family owned. This was what remained of the tiny life Manuela and Iván had tried to make for themselves in New York City. An Ecuadorian and American flag, which she and Iván had bought at a ninety-nine-cent store when they first arrived in town, blocked the basement’s small windows so that no one could see her inside.
On February 9th—the day after Manuela was supposed to leave her apartment, and almost two weeks after her husband’s arrest—she and her daughter flew to Quito. The first leg of her flight, to Panama, was delayed nearly two hours on the tarmac at J.F.K. Manuela gazed out her window for a long while, feeling a mixture of emotions. She missed her parents, who would be waiting for her when she arrived. She wondered if the U.S. government would ever send her the money for leaving. And she thought of Iván, who had been transferred yet again, to a detention center in California. She wasn’t sure when she would see him again, or where. ♦
2026-02-19 20:06:01
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Toni Morrison was many things in her lifetime—Nobel laureate, renowned author, Princeton professor, and generous mentor to young writers. Her appeal translated seamlessly to the internet, where old interview clips still bubble up regularly on social media, reminding us of her sharp wit and commanding presence. But, as Namwali Serpell argues in a new book of essays, “On Morrison,” this undeniable star persona risks eclipsing the genius—and complexity—of the eleven novels she wrote. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz dive back into these works to rediscover the writer as she was on the page. The hosts discuss Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye”; “Beloved,” which is widely regarded as her masterpiece; and “Jazz,” the experimental 1992 novel believed to be her personal favorite. Throughout her career, she insisted on writing flawed, dynamic characters rather than paragons of virtue. “The Morrison project is to put Black life, and particularly the lives of Black women, at the very center of literature—but to do it in a way that’s true to character and to human experience,” Schwartz says. “The people she’s writing about are damaged, are greedy, are jealous, are sad . . . and also are generous, and loving, and hurt and trying to heal.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell
“Toni Morrison, the Teacher,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison
“Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison
“Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House,” by Hilton Als (The New Yorker)
“Jazz,” by Toni Morrison
“Beloved,” by Toni Morrison
“Sula,” by Toni Morrison
“Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison” (The New York Times)
“The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War,” by Jesse McCarthy
Monuments at MOCA and the Brick
“Language as Liberation,” by Toni Morrison
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
2026-02-19 20:06:01
Perhaps you saw footage of Zohran Mamdani at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau: he was there on February 5th, to surprise six couples by officiating their weddings, and to film “The Happiest Government Building in the World,” a mayoral YouTube video released on Valentine’s Day. Or perhaps you caught him atop the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, in a clip announcing plans to open the roof to public visitors. In case you missed those, our new mayor has also appeared on sidewalks and in the back seats of cabs, explaining 3-K and pre-K application procedures on LinkNYC kiosks and Taxi TV. (“Finally my work can be enjoyed as it was meant to be,” Donald Borenstein, the director of video for the Mamadani campaign, posted, with a shot of Mamdani onscreen alongside the fare for an $11.80 cab ride.) The Mayor was filmed riding the W train on his second day in office, and he held a press conference on a bus in the Bronx last week. Mamdani’s early weeks in office have been an exercise in ubiquity. The Mayor is here; the Mayor is there; the Mayor is everywhere.
The Mayor making an appearance anywhere constitutes an event—or, more precisely, a pseudo-event, a term coined by the historian Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” which describes a phenomenon that he saw flooding American culture. A pseudo-event, he writes, is a media spectacle that has an “ambiguous” relationship to any underlying reality. It is “not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. . . . It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.” A press conference is the archetypal pseudo-event; award ceremonies and interviews also qualify. Boorstin was writing in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s famous debate triumph over Richard Nixon, at a time when pseudo-events took up the many on-air hours of television news and the many column inches of afternoon papers, which needed to be filled when a day’s actual happenings had scarcely had a chance to occur. “We used to believe there were only so many ‘events’ in the world,” Boorstin writes. That was no longer the case.
The book gives a particularly trenchant account of the pseudo-event’s role in politics, a realm where canny officials soon realized that they could advance their own agendas by feeding the media’s decreasingly satiable demands. Joseph McCarthy, Boorstin writes, “was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, too. He addressed the public “with a new intimacy,” Boorstin writes, but also “a new subtlety and a new calculatedness.” Poets and playwrights worked alongside speechwriters on his staff. “When the President spoke, almost everyone knew it was a long-planned group production in which F.D.R. was only the star performer.”
The prescience of “The Image” looks obvious in the age of the infinite scroll. (A celebrity social-media post that sets in motion the dutiful production of content would be a prime example of a contemporary pseudo-event.) Mamdani’s deft touch in navigating this reality has been invaluable to his ascendancy, as have his in-house filmmakers and strategists, who are themselves now objects of media attention. Boorstin observed a paradox for anyone attempting to critique a pseudo-event. “Whenever we describe the lighting, the make-up, the studio setting, the rehearsals,” he wrote, “we simply arouse more interest.”
I thought of Boorstin on a Thursday afternoon early this month, as City Hall reporters trooped into the Blue Room, the traditional site of mayoral press conferences. Half the room’s seats had been cordoned off. A staffer directed members of the press to the right, then clarified—“Stage right,” i.e., the left. At the front of the room, next to the main lectern, stood a second lectern approximately half as high. We waited for an unseen curtain to rise.
The Mayor’s public schedule had promised a “child care announcement” with the New York City Public Schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels. The announcement turned out to be that the city was releasing an R.F.I. “Like so many of you, the first time I saw it, I said, ‘What is an R.F.I.?’ ” Samuels told the assembled press. “Well, it is a request for information.” The city was putting out a call for providers interested in participating in its new 2-K and established 3-K programs, something that, in the case of the latter, had not happened in the past five years. (“Today, we say, ‘No more,’ ” Mamdani said.) This worthy, if dry, news offered a pretext for the afternoon’s real show: watching as the Mayor joshed amiably with his other guests, four pre-K students from District Two.
Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who runs a web series called “Recess Therapy,” on which he interviews small children for his 3.2 million followers on Instagram, was seated in the front row of the press area. Reporters were instructed to confine themselves to on-topic questions, but Shapiro-Barnum was allowed to interpret this expansively. “Do any of you have a favorite farm animal, or aquarium animal?” he asked the intermittently on-message group gathered around the short lectern.
“My favorite one is a gold snake that can move and it has gold eyes and it has a long tail, a super, super-duper tail, and it can snap cars and crash the cars,” a boy with shaggy blond hair said.
“And, Mr. Mamdani—”
“It’s also the golden snake,” the Mayor said. He then delivered a précis on the 3-K and pre-K application process and encouraged parents to submit applications by February 27th.
Shapiro-Barnum posted a video of the exchange two days later, followed by a companion video a few days after that, reminding parents about the deadline. If different in form, these were not far removed in tone from the videos the Mayor’s office itself releases, bouncy and uncowed by any risk of sounding corny. For a spot promoting public bathroom access, Mamdani washed his hands in a Harlem park men’s room; for a video about municipal finance, he explained the rudiments of the city’s “incredibly confusing” budget process. (“What can I say? We’re perfectionists. And bound by the reforms of the nineteen-seventies fiscal crisis.”) His droll explanatory mode calls to mind the “Hamilton” era of educational entertainment for adults—a twenty-tens wave of earnest pop-culture optimism that New York magazine once termed “Obamacore.” But if do-gooder didacticism has worn thin in the context of, say, a streaming series (think of Aziz Ansari diligently explaining why sexism is bad on “Master of None”), it has now found a more appropriate home. If anyone’s entitled to a cheerful, dorky P.S.A., surely it’s the city government.
Mamdani’s approach seems intended to project a new relationship between New Yorkers and City Hall, one that relies on insistently personal terms and emphasizes care and communication. (In the time since the new administration took over the official mayoral social-media channels, Instagram posts regularly inspire engagement orders of magnitude greater than they did under Eric Adams, despite the former mayor’s rivetingly weird presence.) The P.S.A.s, the social-media posts, and the special guest appearances constitute a parasocial civic bond—and, maybe, something more. In a culture even more media-saturated than the one Boorstin described, I have at times wondered whether such pseudo-events might come back around to being real. Creating wide awareness and participation is essential to a universal program like 3-K; if an onslaught of cute videos inspires sufficient public engagement, will it be fair to say that cute videos were instrumental to that program’s success? After all, before “performative” became a buzzword meaning “only doing something for show,” it meant, essentially, the opposite: saying or doing something that actually changes reality.
The weather—now there’s a brute-force phenomenon to blow away theoretical abstractions like “performativity,” or so one might think. The winter storm that bore down on New York City last month was generally agreed by the news media, in breathless headlines, to be a test: “Mamdani’s First Big Test,” a “Major Test,” specifically a “Major Governing Test.” (“Mamdani Knows It’s a Test,” the Times affirmed.) Yet the Mayor’s task seemed primarily to be a matter of remaining extremely visible and communicative, while committing no egregious public blunders, as members of the municipal workforce did their jobs. The snow fell; the snow was plowed; the Mayor was everywhere, offering constant updates at press conferences, in videos, and on the radio. “There’s snow doubt about it: there’s a big winter storm headed our way,” he began a clip filmed at a Department of Sanitation facility, which had him striding alongside D.S.N.Y. trucks outfitted with plows. The media had done its best to make a pseudo-event of the weather, and on these terms—as should have surprised no one—the Mayor succeeded. “OK Zohran, So You Aced the Storm,” City & State conceded.
But as the cold persisted into the next week and then the one following, a new test emerged, one more impervious to a communications strategy. The count of New Yorkers who had died outdoors ticked grimly upward, passing fifteen and then twenty. It was difficult to blame this on a particular misstep by Mamdani’s administration, which did not stop critics from trying. (The Post, not known for excessive sympathy toward the unhoused, now took up their cause with righteous fervor.) The deaths had a mute irrefutability. On February 4th, the day before the Blue Room child-care press conference, the city rolled out a LinkNYC P.S.A. directed at homeless New Yorkers that sounded almost plaintive in its request. “If you are staying outside, please come indoors,” the Mayor said. “We want to help keep you safe.” Under state law, involuntarily removing a person from the streets requires that he or she “appears to be mentally ill” and likely poses a danger to themselves or others, which includes an inability to meet their own basic needs. These standards had not changed under Mamdani, but their salience had: now they became a proxy for the new Mayor’s attitude toward using force. Mayoral press conferences and news releases began to include a running tally of involuntary transportations—an acknowledgment, perhaps, of some outer limit to the power of asking nicely from a screen. A thaw finally appeared in the forecast; a City Council hearing on the deaths passed with minimal incident. “I know we’ve been making a lot of videos about the weather,” the Mayor said, in a video released as temperatures rose last week. “Let’s keep taking care of each other.”
The weekend after the Blue Room press conference, I watched footage of the pseudo-event circulating online, and, even having been there in person, found myself captivated. (CNN: “Kid Charms Crowd at Mamdani News Conference.”) The shagginess of the live show—kids milling, sitting on the floor, repeating themselves—had vanished, as had the explanation of the R.F.I. The press corps had essentially been drafted into serving as extras. The Mayor ad-libbed gamely, the children basked in adult attention, and, as the proceedings concluded, Shapiro-Barnum started to clap. He stopped himself when no one else joined in, but it was, in all fairness, a reasonable error. ♦
2026-02-19 07:06:02
The important thing about adaptations isn’t what’s taken out but what’s put in. Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”—or, as she’d have it, “ ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” complete with scare quotes—is the season’s second Frankenstein movie, because Fennell takes bits and pieces from Emily Brontë’s novel and, adding much of her own imagining, reassembles them into a misbegotten thing that wants only to be loved. And paying audiences seem to love it, even if many critics don’t.
What’s lovable about it is love itself: Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is an unabashedly romantic movie emerging at a time when few such films are being made—at least, for theatrical release and by directors with some artistic cachet. It’s unlikely that many viewers have been fretting about the quality of the adaptation, and I’m in sympathy with such indifference, whether it arises from not having read the novel on which the film is based or just not caring about (literary) fidelity. Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education; it’s a matter of judging a movie on the basis of a principle, even a prejudice (and the pride that goes with it), rather than on experience. Yes, I also sometimes compare films to their literary source and criticize them on that basis, but I also know why I do so: not to protect that source (even the worst filmmakers aren’t burning the books, just misunderstanding them) but to complain that the movie isn’t as good as the book itself and to try to figure out why not.
Perhaps the worst thing that Hollywood’s long-standing formulaic approach has done is to persuade even sophisticated critics that movies can’t rival literature as exalted artistic achievements. If films had always been made with the degree of freedom that is common in the literary sphere, the notion of their equality with books—something that’s generally accepted when it comes to music and visual art—wouldn’t be controversial. Tellingly, many movies that reach the heights of the art stem from relatively unexalted sources—gangster stories, say—and when literary adaptations falter it is often because of exaggerated respect for the original, resulting in creative inhibition. Many of the best adaptations range far afield from the source material. But, whether faithful or not, when an adaptation is bad, what’s missing isn’t literature but cinema.
It’s notable that last year’s great adaptation, Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” is even freer than Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” DaCosta’s decision to transplant Ibsen’s 1890 play “Hedda Gabler” from Norway to nineteen-fifties England is minor compared to her expansion of the action from the single drawing room of the play to an uproarious party at a lavish estate, filmed upstairs and down, indoors and out (not to mention other, similarly drastic changes). And even that transformation, ingenious as it is—amounting, indeed, to a vital cinematic act of literary criticism—would count for little had the movie not sparked emotional excitements and complications, subtleties and furies, that were all its own, or if the writing and filming and performances had been less aesthetically thrilling and intricately enticing. Likewise, my pick for the best movie of all time, Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear,” turns Shakespeare’s play into a Mafia drama of Don Learo, with a post-apocalyptic premise and a cast of characters that includes a descendant of Shakespeare, a reclusive director, and Norman Mailer as himself. No need to fret about what’s left out (plenty); Godard locates what he persuasively considers the play’s essence and, from there, extrapolates with thematic profundities and stylistic extravagances of overwhelming wonder.
“Wuthering Heights,” extrapolates, too, of course. The many truncations and excisions have been detailed copiously, including by my colleague Justin Chang. What Fennell chiefly adds is something that could hardly have been in a novel published in 1847: sex. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, apparently unconsummated in Brontë, is a hot-blooded affair in the movie. Even if its heat is more suggested than unleashed, Fennell renders the pair’s emotional and sexual freedom, too, as signalled in a scene in which Catherine masturbates and Heathcliff, catching her in the act, licks her fingers. What made Fennell’s 2023 melodrama “Saltburn” more than just the twisty tale of a social-climbing schemer working his wiles is the seductive power that its interloping protagonist exerts—by way of his own viscous pleasures and secret kinks. In her “Wuthering Heights,” the bonds of cruelty and affliction in Heathcliff’s later relationship with Isabella are turned into an explicitly B.D.S.M. dynamic, in which Isabella delights. (No need for her to escape in Fennell’s version, as she does in the book.)
The effect is to demythologize Brontë. If all that impeded the characters’ sex lives in the book were the law and decorum of the author’s day, why not tell something like the truth? If one revisits the past to dispel myths, one worth dispelling is that of a lost era of chastity. But that’s not what Fennell does. Instead of lifting the lid off history and anchoring the adapted parts of “Wuthering Heights” in the specifics of the period when they’re set (roughly from the American Revolution to the French one), Fennell turns history decorative, decks it out in material fantasies so awkward that it’s unclear whether they are deliberate anachronisms or whether they’re just off.
The overwhelming silliness of the movie falls short of camp—it’s neither intentionally self-parodic nor exaggeratedly theatrical. On the contrary, even its most outlandish and grotesque inventions are portrayed tastefully, with a sheen of aesthetic refinement that turns the most intensely emotional moments into emblems of emotion. The film’s pictorial expression remains under the top. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” isn’t a bad adaptation, just a banal movie, no worse in what it takes from Brontë than in what it tacks on.
Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to Fennell’s effort, because what she really appears to be adapting is less Brontë than a cinematic genre that has more or less fallen into oblivion: the romantic drama. Though mediocre in itself, “Wuthering Heights” is a kind of placeholder, a symbol of an entire swath of filmmaking that now hardly exists but has been newly brought back to the fore by the ample and ubiquitous archive of streaming. Such movies were long known in Hollywood as “women’s pictures” (even if many of the romantic agonies afflicted the movie’s men, too). The genre’s supreme artists were John M. Stahl (from the silent era through the nineteen-forties) and Douglas Sirk (in the nineteen-fifties), and they were joined by other directors of similar ambition and accomplishment, such as Frank Borzage and George Cukor. Their melodramas of heartbreak and redemption, as in Stahl’s “Only Yesterday” (based on a novella by Stefan Zweig), Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows,” filled with wild coincidences and fervent confessions, are what could be called tearjerkers. These movies have the extraordinary merit of putting the passions of love and the obstacles to relationships front and center, balancing personal desires and social obligations on an equal footing, and thereby lending bourgeois life the grandeur of tragedy.
Few of the best movies of this past year feature much in the way of romance. “Sinners” indeed includes one of the year’s great love stories but keeps it fragmentary, secondary, and, ultimately, symbolic. “The Mastermind” and “Hedda” are downright bitter about love. “The Phoenician Scheme” is a vision of paternal love, and what remains of romantic love is retrospective, a tale of mourning along with a vengeance plot; “One Battle After Another,” too, is a paternal story that starts with a significant but superficially sketched romantic relationship. “Marty Supreme” is driven by romance, and the thinness of its central couple’s relationship—the one that begins and ends the movie—is compensated for by its thematic implication of a bond of ineffable absoluteness, a passion beyond words. In this regard, “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, reminds me of one of that era’s great movies, “Rear Window,” in which Alfred Hitchcock offers, in a monologue spoken by the superb character actress Thelma Ritter, a definitive credo of transcendently carnal love. But, “Marty Supreme,” true to its title and its eponymous character, isn’t a women’s picture; the romance, sharply conceived though it is, is ultimately little more than a series of obstacles on the protagonist’s athletically existential journey.
Dig further, into this year’s Oscar nominees, and the pattern holds: romantic stories are nonexistent (“Bugonia”) or brief, bland, and merely functional (“Train Dreams”). Looking at the art houses, there’s little difference: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is decidedly anti-romantic; “The Testament of Ann Lee” is centered on the renunciation of sex. One movie that winks at classics of the genre, Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?,” also shows why the genre now hardly exists; the film is an object lesson in genre collapse. It’s about a man who divorces unhappily, finds solace performing standup comedy, and thereby eventually reunites with his ex-wife; it pays such close, narrow-bore attention to its central relationship and those around it that it seals out just about every other motive, idea, and observation. It’s a relationship suspended in a void.
Another Hollywood-proximate 2025 release that’s entirely about relationships also confronts its subject as much economically as emotionally, boldly planting a scalpel blade between love and marriage: Celine Song’s “Materialists.” It’s about the romantic tribulations (which are also financial quandaries) of a professional matchmaker, and its astringently rational approach to affairs of the heart is its most original aspect. Song brings this notion to life with sharp dialogue, images, and performances—but the story unfortunately gives way to clattery plot mechanisms. Despite the drastic differences in substance and in aesthetic quality of “Materialists” and “Is This Thing On?,” they come off as nearly equally false—because neither addresses the elephant in the room, the virtually shrieking threats to democracy in the United States. What Fennell has purchased, so to speak, with the adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” isn’t just a romantic template but a repudiation of any social consciousness: the content-free, history-free, politics-free populism of a movie about nothing but romance.
And yet—speaking of dispelling myths about the past—the idea that classic Hollywood romances were abstractly apolitical is itself a convenient fiction. John M. Stahl’s “Only Yesterday” is anchored in the Depression, and the plot of his “When Tomorrow Comes” is set in motion by waitresses covertly making a risky plan to go on strike. Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” is one of Hollywood’s most anguished visions of ingrained American racism, and his “All That Heaven Allows” has genuine philosophical scope (with reference to Thoreau). For that matter, “Casablanca,” which dismisses its own romantic obsession in a famous line—“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”—is a drama of war, of Fascist rule, and of anti-Nazi resistance. Three little people’s romantic quandaries are indeed inextricable from the crazy world. Even in times of horror, couples form, families continue, children are born. Currently, most prestige movies are confronting half of life; Fennell’s movie is at least considering the other.
That’s why, for all the artistic inadequacy of “Wuthering Heights,” I’m cheered by the prospect of its box-office success. Profit breeds emulation, and if romance is back other filmmakers are likely to take it on. Maybe they’ll find a way to do so with a more ample, honest context and a more imaginative style to give it form—to help love find its place in the world and vice versa. ♦
2026-02-19 05:06:01
Lauren Groff is perhaps most known for her best-selling third novel, “Fates and Furies,” which President Barack Obama named his favorite book of 2015, but she has also developed a devoted audience for her short stories. In those compressed works, she manages to tackle great themes—grief, parenthood, violence toward women and the meaning of safety, how we imagine our lives turning out, and how those imagined futures weave themselves into reality in surprising ways. Groff’s latest collection, “Brawler,” comes out next week. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some of her favorite writers of short fiction. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
by Clarice Lispector
Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. Her family fled the pogroms when she was a baby, eventually settling in Brazil. As an adult, she moved around a lot because her husband was a diplomat. And I think she’s a genius. There’s just nobody who writes like her. Her writing plays according to very strong internal rules—the aesthetic is really regulated and, in many ways, sui generis. I just love her so much.
Lispector wrote a lot about women. Many of her stories are about the internal space within women’s psyches, and the way that they encounter the world as they go about their lives. She wrote about the world as we know it, but in such a slantwise way that it becomes surreal. They convey her vision of the world, which was extraordinarily strange. I also think that, because of her background, she always felt like a bit of an outsider. You can tell this from her work: even though she’s writing from within the center, in a way, her perspective is a few steps outside of it.
by Yoko Ogawa
This book is three novellas—I think that might still fall under the rubric of “short story.” Ogawa is another surrealist, in some ways, and these stories are really disturbing—almost on the brink of horror. They’re really about evil itself. “The Diving Pool,” the one the collection is named after, haunts me. I think about it all the time. Another, “Pregnancy Diary,” actually first appeared in The New Yorker. Ogawa’s writing—at least, as translated by Stephen Snyder—is made up of these relatively simple sentences, but the cumulative effect is hypnotic.
by Joy Williams
I talk about Williams all the time, because I think she is a great master. Her brain is just so weird and magnificent and wondrous.
These stories span her career, so you see the way her work progresses through time. There are some new stories toward the end.
What I love most about Williams is the way that she will break a sentence to surprise you. Again, like Lispector, she has her own internal logic. She has an internal view of the world that is so clear to her that, when you finish reading her stories, you also start to walk through the world in the way that she does.
by John Keene
This is a masterpiece—one of the best short-story/novella collections written by an American in the past fifty years, I think. I just love Keene’s voice and how he subverts American history. The book is quite experimental, taking preëxisting structures and transforming them in ways that really speak to the underlying stories that he’s trying to tell. One way the book approaches history is by unfolding across different places and examining the past of each of them. The first story, for example, is called “Mannahatta,” and it’s about the beginning of Manhattan. There’s another story titled “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” I think that kind of detail speaks to the book’s playfulness, singing back to things in the canon, like “Moby-Dick.”
by Anton Chekhov
He’s the source, right? I try to read him once a year, just to go back to his way of thinking about the world. Chekhov had such profound empathy for every single one of his characters, and when I go back to him I try to glean something from that—the lack of judgment, the clarity of vision.
